The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will hold a new round of face recognition algorithm evaluation.

The new activity will be conducted as part of the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT). The last FRVT was conducted in 2014.

Unlike previous years, the new FRVT will be conducted on an ongoing basis.

As detailed here, this means the evaluation will remain open indefinitely such that developers may submit their algorithms to NIST whenever they are ready, but no more frequently than 120 days.

On its website, NIST noted that the algorithms will be evaluated rapidly on a first-come-first-served basis, following our MINEX III evaluation of fingerprint recognition implementations. Performance results will be posted to the NIST website as soon as they are ready.

NIST has said this approach more closely aligns evaluation with development schedules; this improves over the two to four year interval between past FRVT tests.

The new FRVT will open in mid February. Each submitted algorithm must implement a C++ API.